[Buffalobob]

That was an interesting link. I never understood the "free fire zone" policy even though I always operated in such zones. We never ever shot a single civilian because we tried to behave somewhat decently. The weirdest thing was we hit a village one morning that the NVA used as a way station and killed a couple of armed guys and there was supposed to be no civilians in the area so they brought in a hook and lifted the civilians out to to DaNang and a week later everyone of them were back tending their rice paddies. I guess it was their home and they were not going to give up their home, war or no war. In later years I often thought about them and was happy none of them had gotten hurt in the shoot out.

Ineffective efforts to rein in the GIs’ propensity to create free fire zones in Vietnam resulted in a sense among many Vietnamese as well as Americans that U.S. forces were undisciplined. More important, perhaps, the widely touted grand plan to capture the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese was immeasurably diminished by the perception—let alone the outbreaks of reality—that Americans did not value Vietnamese lives.